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Microsoft will cease development of its family of Zune-branded music players due to weak demand and a desire to focus on its smartphone platform. Dave McLauchlan, Senior Business Development Manager for Zune - We were completely frank about this year's Zune hardware being the WP7 phones, and we continue to both sell and fully support the Zune HD line of products. And as I've promised – we continue to bring new apps and games to the platform. More of those are in the works, I promise you.

"As BT continues to invest in the network and network bandwidth we can now remove these restrictions and ensure the experience of the wider customer base," declared Mayuresh Thavapalan, general manager of Consumer Broadband at BT Retail. "On completion there will be no individual user controls targeted at atypical users on our BT Total Broadband and BT Infinity products." Meanwhile in the US - Starting May 2, AT&T will impose 150GB monthly limits on its currently uncapped DSL service, while its fiber-to-the-node U-Verse subscribers will get 250GB.

EVEN IF IT ISN'T COSTLY, TELCOS ARE GETTING SQUEEZED AND DON'T HAVE A LOT OF MONEY TO SPEND ON INFRASTRUCTURE IMPROVEMENTS? AT&T posted $20 billion in net income (on revenues of $124 billion) for 2010. 7.8 Billion of that profit was for wireline. TOO MANY PEOPLE USING TOO MUCH BANDWIDTH IS HARD TO FIX RIGHT? Unlike cable, In DSL each customer has a connection to the Co and a aggregated in a DSLAM (am stands for access multiplexer). BUT ITS REALLY COSTLY? It is relatively inexpensive to upgrade the DSLAM and backhaul connection to relive congestion. Other congestion problems may occur at local regional switches and routers.EVEN IF IT ISN'T COSTLY, TELCOS ARE GETTING SQUEEZED AND DON'T HAVE A LOT OF MONEY TO SPEND ON INFRASTRUCTURE IMPROVEMENTS? AT&T posted $20 billion in net income (on revenues of $124 billion) for 2010. 7.8 Billion of that profit was for wireline. OK BUT COSTS ARE RISING RIGHT, YOU HAVE TO PLAN FOR TOMORROW? AT&T's expenses to operate its networks, pay its employees, do network engineering and planning, buy gear, and even pay the property taxes on its many small network buildings around the country dropped by 3.2 percent in 2010.

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HP Strategy Day in San Francisco, California. -- HP will launch its own public cloud service platform and a related open application store (2011-2012). HP TouchPad coming June, webOS for PC beta by year's end. HP plans to ship 100 million webOS devices, including tablets, phones, PCs and printers.

Apotheker Sets Hewlett-Packard on a Cloud-Centric Path. "We will ship webOS tabs and Windows tablets. We just need the right version of Windows to do that."

The Media Piracy Project, published last week by the Social Science Research Council - The three-year study into media piracy in emerging economies concentrated on countries such as Russia, Mexico and India.

Most industrial complexes located in south. The two most pressing concerns for industry are damage to the transportation infrastructure and reliability of power, said Dale Ford, senior vice president at IHS iSuppli. It could take as long as two months to resolve those problems, he added. "It's really too early to tell what is going to change and what is not," said Jim Handy, the principal analyst at Objective Analysis.

"A live geiger counter at altTokyo.com updates a graph with data every 60 seconds, and a uStream channel broadcasting the digital display of another Tokyo geiger counter was drawing more than 14,000 viewers earlier today." Radiationnetwork.com, a crowd-sourced radiation-monitoring network of roughly a dozen or so unofficial monitoring sites around the United States, updated every three minutes. So far, all monitoring stations report radiation measurements well within normal background levels.

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"Hey Tom and the TNT Crew,

I'm an English teacher living in Tokyo and I wanted to share some of the websites I'm using to stay up to date on the latest developments. RSOE (http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/index2.php) has a list of all disasters around the world including the information and position of the earthquakes soon after they happen as well as information about the nuclear plants. It's all over the news now, but yesterday in Tokyo the radiation levels spiked to about 8 times above normal background levels for a short time. Although Tokyo is 150mi (250km) away from the failing plant in Fukushima (Fu-ku-she-ma), there's always a risk for radioactive materials to be carried in the wind. The Natural Research Lab has a page tracking the radiation in Tokyo (http://park18.wakwak.com/~weather/geiger_index.html) as well as a live ustream video of a Geiger counter in Tokyo (http://www.ustream.tv/channel/geiger-counter-tokyo). Aftershocks here have been occuring consistantly, and as I was writing this there was a M6.0 that hit about 75mi (125km) SW of Tokyo. Given everything that's happening combined with planned rolling blackouts, a lot of companies are shutting down for a while including Sony.

Keep up the great work,
Steve Conning (Tokyo, Japan)"

"Some news today, no rolling black outs near kamiooka, in Yokohama. Every area is going to be subjected to this until the end of April as stated today. These blackouts take down stop lights, trains, and residential areas. Many people were caught off guard today as train lines either shut Dow. Partly through the day or never started, my wife works in Tokyo ward Nd attempted to go in to work but didn't make it.

Many folks where I work made it in but found out the trains would stop running before leaving work. Arrangements were to be made to let them go early as they would have a long walk or bus ride. ride sharing is coming up so those with cars can help those without get close to or at home. Some folks walked up to 4 hours Friday to get out of Tokyo.